Inauguration Day Music on Performance Today

If your station airs Performance Today from American Public Media, you can hear the piece John Williams wrote for the Inauguration.  Don’t you think it’s fantastic that President Obama (I love the sound of that) chose classical music for the featured piece at the Inauguration itself?Williams’ piece, which he calls Air and Simple Gifts, opens the first hour of Performance Today on today’s (Wednesday’s) show.  If your station doesn’t carry the program or if you’ve missed it you can hear it on-demand here.

I spoke to Yo-Yo Ma about the piece just two weeks ago and he said it was still being revised!  But he was happy and excited to play it with that particular cast of characters.  Talk about diversity — an Israeli-American, an African-American, a Chinese-American and a woman from Venezuela.  Music knows no borders.

While that was going on, Clear Channel used the cover of the Inauguration to lay off 1,850 people, many in radio.  You can read about it here.  The layoff doesn’t particularly impact classical radio, because if I’m not mistaken Clear Channel doesn’t have any classical stations, but it’s rotten for the radio industry, and it’s especially rotten that they tried to hide the layoff on a big news day.

Maybe big corporate radio is not what’s best for people after all.